So we’ve slowed things down a bit. Far be it from me to complain, as I have yet to really grasp some of the syntactic maneuvers of coding arrays. But I’m interested in exploring a bit how this slowing down feels compared to the brisk pace we had been experiencing the first few weeks.

In the first few weeks, I felt as if I was awash in the coding lessons, I felt immersed in the practice, overwhelmed but also driven. This created a kind of acute anxiety that produced both a sense of debilitation as well as production. Rapidly approaching deadlines have that effect in general, but it felt even more irritative combined with the steep curve of learning something new. Todd gets at this in his post about how discombobulated some of this makes him. And Aden, too, discusses a similar oscillation between despair and accomplishment.

In this past week, I’ve felt a bit of relief with the slower pace of coding. And that’s great and all, but I’m now feeling a different breed of slower-creeping dread, perhaps not unlike the specter from It Follows. I’m not sure I enjoy this feeling any more than the pace in our first few weeks of Fury Road coding. I will need to watch for flying objects in seminar after saying this, but I think I prefer the more intensive, immersive pace of the first few weeks. //ducks//

In other words, I’ve put off coding a bit, or at least not engaged it as intensely as I have in the first few weeks. Some of that could be from finding a semester-rhythm that has settled into what a dull realization of what is possible with the commitments I have. But some of it also come from, I think, a shift in how a new pace has shifted my expectations. I sense a connection to our discussions of techno-determinism here, but perhaps I’ll explore that in future posts on practice.